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Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is America’s art heartland, at least in the collective imagination. Artists started moving there in the 1980s, attracted by the affordable, if illegal, lofts five minutes from the East Village. But the dingy artist-run cafés and galleries they set up gave way in quick succession to commercial galleries, the polished chrome of Francophone joints serving Italian coffees, yoga studios, dog-and-baby stores, and finally, ultimately, the apex of the gentrification pyramid: legal lofts outfitted with chef’s kitchens. By 2002, New York Times writers were already avidly tracking the spread of a creature known as “the hipster” that had colonized the Williamsburg waterfront and was moving inland along the L-train. Now, cities from Los Angeles to Paducah, Kentucky, [see page 32] want what Williamsburg has—or had: the ability to mint money from decaying industrial power plants and sugar factories.

But back to the early 1990s: Then, everyone thought of change as a one-way transaction—meaning, chiefly, a movement that leaves the changer intact—and they sought to extend the party indefinitely. That mania for change meant, however, that the writing was already on the wall. It hovered there in the form of a serpentine question mark, like the commissioned graffiti above the Vespa shop.

Initially, some folks expressed mild surprise that the vegan restaurant that replaced the check-cashing place could turn a buck. After all, who were those people? We didn’t know anyone who wore hemp sandals, and yet the new cafés persisted and multiplied until finally the ur-café, the grungiest and earliest, the L Café, shut its doors two years ago, thoroughly out-competed. Then came the nouveaux cafés serving soy lattes and the ersatz French bistros. Of course, we should have known it was all over when the film crews arrived—oh, those Law & Order production slaves and music video vultures! On the surface, none of it quite added up to the Starbucks-style homogenization everyone anticipated. Except it did. No actual Starbucks has yet arrived in Williamsburg, but the minor latte kings are thriving.

From thriving artist neighborhood with a revved-up cultural life, Williamsburg transformed, as fast as one can say Vice magazine, into a booming artsy locale. Once an important capital of cultural production, the neighborhood became ground zero for the leading edge of something quite different: cultural consumption, specifically that serving the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Overnight, it seemed, folks quit dressing distinctively, or horror of horrors, they started wearing clothes as if they just didn’t care. Out went affordable studios and workaday habits; in came the faux mo (an especially indecisive hairstyle popularized by footballer David Beckham), ironic Atari t-shirts, and limited-edition sneakers, worn by adults who insist on skateboards and bikes with banana seats as their preferred mode of transportation—or should that be faux transpo?

As if cloned by alien pods from a distant, dying planet, Williamsburg’s population of artists, writers, and musicians eventually began to disappear, replaced by entities only superficially like them. (Nick Zinner, guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, for example, described on the Web site freewilliamsburg.com the epiphany that caused him to depart the neighborhood thusly: “It’s becoming a parody of itself… It’s just turning in on itself and feeding off itself. I felt like a cliché in my own neighborhood.”) Cold, distant, and just not quite there except when ironically appropriating some gee-gaw of cultural value, like, say, a wool cap worn in summer, the new denizens of Williamsburg energetically drained the neighborhood’s soul, as surely as if they had sprouted ravenous tendrils. Eventually, Williamsburg died a slow but sure death every bit as predictable and horrible as San Francisco’s in Phillip Kaufman’s 1978 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or more to the point, productive, artistic Williamsburg passed on when it came face-to-face with its listless, lifestyle-centered mirror opposite: the hipster.

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,” wrote that crank of British letters, Cyril Connolly. A clear warning against idealizing one’s own salad days, Connolly’s aphorism gains heft with every generational cycle, as the new replaces the old. Progress, it seems, shops at thrift stores. Hipsters understand, above all, that “cultural trends become fin the moment they hit the mainstream,” writes Robert Lanham, in the Williamsburg-centric Hipster Handbook. But what if hipsterdom turns out to be the vanguard of the mainstream? Who is the hipster? He is a careful observer of those skinny, starving artists in their one-dollar secondhand t-shirts. He likes to buy similar shirts at a national chain. He is, above all else, a consumer.

This article appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!

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